Is Bitcoin Gold A Big Scam In the Making?

Tell Me that Bitcoin Gold is NOT Pulling Our Collective Legs!

Bitcoin Gold A Big Scam in the Making?

Well shucks! I don’t know.

We were expecting to see another hard fork 25October that generates the Bitcoin Gold token at http://btcgpu.org. With the full network launch scheduled for November 1. The project was first announced on Bitcointalk.org in July and was created by Jack Liao, the founder of Lightning ASIC a mining firm based out of Hong Kong and an anonymous developer named “h4x3.” The forked protocol goals are to change bitcoin’s consensus algorithm allowing users to mine the currency with graphic processing units (GPUs) and other changes. According to the development team, Bitcoin Gold will use the Equihash algorithm used by the altcoin Zcash rather than bitcoin’s original SHA256.

Bitcoin Gold implements the UAHF (User Activated Hard Fork) proposal to accept GPU mining,” explains the website archive. “Miners can choose the size of the blocks they want to mine, with a default of 1 MB. It includes replay and wipeout protection.

Many bitcoin advocates viewed this Bitcoin Gold (BTG) project as a joke, scam or even “crypto-trolling.” Now why oh why would anyone not take this seriously.

There’s a lot of good reasons people believe its a prank because the project seems extremely unorganized for a hard fork slated for the end of October. We are 11 days away and they fall off the face of the earth with no word from the crew.

Even before the above 2 events occurred, they have no white paper, it is said they have yet to implement replay protection. Replay protection is avoiding the risk of sending someone Bitcoin Gold and it sends them both Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin from your wallet! Oy Vey!

Replay Protection

Okay quick education time!

In the event of a hard fork without replay protection, transactions that spend Bitcoin are valid on both the Bitcoin Chain and the Bitcoin Gold chains. That is, if Judy sends John 1 coin on the BTC chain, the same transaction will be valid on the BTG chain.

Judy may be trying to send John 1 Bitcoin and 1 Bitcoin Gold, in which case she’d be broadcasting the transaction on both chains and have no vulnerability. However, if she wanted to send John only 1Bitcoin and not 1 Bitcoin Gold, we have a problem. Judy will, of course, broadcast the transaction on the Bitcoin chain, but the transaction is now public and that opens up a security vulnerability.

An attacker can take the public transaction sending 1 Bitcoin from Judy to John from the BTC chain and replay it on the BTG chain. This would cause John to get the 1 Bitcoin Gold. This is called a replay attack and causes a lot of unintended transactions.

Replay Protection is the generalized term for how you can prevent an attacker from executing replay attacks. In other words, make transactions from the Bitcoin chain not valid on the Bitcoin Gold chain and vice versa.

Now you see why replay protection is IMPORTANT to IMPLEMENT!

Now where were we.

The Bitcoin Gold developers didn’t have a testnet ready so developers could not beat the crap out of their code base to see if there were any glaring deficiencies, errors, bugs, or gotchas. This is against software development testing requirements. Come on guys! Get it together…. wherever you are!

The Bitcoin Gold codebase is not yet fully developed and ready to be deployed. Implementation of the new proof-of-work algorithm and replay protection, as well as the new difficulty re-adjustment scheme, are yet to be finished.

Again, not all the of details for the project are flushed out.

So how the heck are they planning to fork Bitcoin in 11 days when nothing is close to being ready? What is really going on here? Should I start my conspiracy theory rant.

Shucks! We’re all speculating that the reason Jack Liao wants to change the bitcoin algorithm to become GPU-mineable (vs. ASICs) , is because hemanufactures GPU miners that can mine the Zcash algorithm Equihash. That would be a nice big ol’ cash payday for him, eh?

Bitcoin goes up like a freakin rocket, Bitcoin Gold disappears off the face of the earth? Where are you, Jack?

I won’t start the conspiracy theory rant at this time. Not right now … But stay tuned.